Are we having Phase Two Yet?

Taking my little CD forward.


With the "plain" and "elegant" versions of the Kiara 08 live CD built and uploaded, I feel that Kiara is much better than I originally intended, and development can proceed more slowly. After the download links hae been tested, I'm going to start making additional software available for Kiara, beginning with tarball Archives for the source files. Users will be able to use these files for installing Kiara to hard drives, flash drives and virtual machines, and to create their own custom builds of Kiara or Slax. If all goes well, the tarballs will be available before tomorrow.

After that, I intend to upload upload additional software for Kiara, in the form of almost all the packages of Slackware 12.2, ported to slax modules, but that may not happen depending on how my bandwidth is holding up. At the very least, I'll link to the Slackware files and provide instructions for porting the files to Slax format (It ain't rocket science.)

The course of future upgrades of Kiara will depend to a very great extent on the future of Slax. Kiara is intended as the last line of defense in keeping KDE 3.5 alive as a viable desktop, at least for the home user aficianado, at least some of the time. If KDE4 was ever an issue, I don't think it really is anymore. I use KDE4 frquently in a Sidux as a live CD, and I often run kubuntu froom the hard drive, when I'm not using the first partition to develop Kiara. I have nothing against KDE4-- but I'm not giving up my my KDE3.5. Why? Because I don't have to.

In a worst case scenario, Kiara is being built to run as a read-only "live root", running as a live CD with a hard drive partition mounted as /home. This provides a layer of extra security while allowing for all the data retention of a normal hard drive install. The security of of live root system can be compromised, but simply rebooting the hard drive. The catch is a few minutes extra prep time after rebooting, to mount and configure the /home partition. That's what the setup tool on the root desktop are about. If nothing else changes, future upgrades will follow upgrades of major third party applications, such as firefox, opera, and thunderbird.

When the software is finally established, I intend to start in on the documentation. This is the part that I've been truly looking forward to. More on that later.